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Anti-Propaganda

The U.S. is awash in lies! Yes, gullible fools crowd our streets, our schools, and our voting booths vomiting their worthless opinions upon us at every turn! We are plagued by disinformation, propaganda, lies, delusion.
That is what our media tell us. That is what we hear every day. Generalizations and opinions hurled upon the populace without the faintest regard for anything but the inspiration of emotion. We have heard all of this before, though. In the 2000s it was terrorists, 90s the Y2K bug, and welfare. Look back and you will find a lines of thought and persuasive appeal with one thing in common: they want to excite you.

The choice of sources from which we get our news are of the highest importance in this new Information Age. How informed--or misinformed as may be the case-- we remain is a direct result of whom allow to influence and persuade us.

Legal Domestic Propaganda is a resource and analysis tool. An Anti-narrative so-to-speak. LDP does not to weave new tales of history or invent wondrous explanations for current events. Its purpose is to help people navigate their way through the bullsh*t, and find their own explanations. Propaganda is used by those with power regardless of their political persuasion. This is anti-propaganda.

Many Alternative News sites debase and degrade all of journalism for propagating the system, and other like reasons. But such a narrow view is is woefully wrong in light of the many valiant journalists in the world that risk life and limb (literally) to expose the truth. LDP honors the organizations and investigative journalists that speak truth to power and represent the credibility that America should expect from its newsmakers. Here are a few of the best:

Largest hack to date revealed one year later.

Yahoo, currently in buyout negotiations with Verizon made an untimely admission about the extent of its security problems. Over 1 billion users had their email addresses and personal details stolen rom the company servers.

The online giant makes this disclosure after it already admitted being the victim of an entirely separate theft of 500 million email addresses earlier in the year.

The only real question remaining is; who still has a Yahoo account?

Without doubt, one of the most infuriating aspects of this is the complete disregard with which Yahoo has handled the situation. Not only were the company's security protocols ineffective, but apparently its attitude regarding user information was reckless as well.

Not admitting to the theft unti now, a full year later reveals the extent to which user information is barely blip on the corporate radar for our largest tech companies.

The truth is that until users demand that their privacy be respected and also punish via boycott those companies who fail to respect it, our tech giants will continue to treat user information and concerns as an afterthought.

Operation Condor Revealed after 40 years in CIA lockbox.

The Internet abounds with free but increasingly hidden or compromised information. Fake News,Russian hackers, and Public relations wizardry are all playing their part to usher us further down the rabbit hole in this newly coined post-truth era.

So where does a budding researcher go for information in a post-truth world?

Why not begin with the National Security Archive? George Washington University, home of the independent organization, nevertheless does great work disseminating newly declassified information from all areas of government and military sector. More especially the archive and the Universty function as a legitimizing historian of sorts for the intelligence and military apparatus For example: here's some of their latest I just received via email.

OPERATION CONDOR: Officials of Amnesty International Targeted for ‘Liquidation’. New Documents Shed Light on OPERATION CONDOR, planned missions in Europe

National Security Archive Alert

Washington D.C., December 12 -

Operation Condor, the trans-border, multinational effort by Southern Cone secret police services to track down and “liquidate” opponents of their regimes in the 1970s, targeted officials of Amnesty International as well as human rights groups, and planned overseas missions in Paris and London, according to a comprehensive CIA report on Condor operations released today by the Obama administration. “The basic mission of Condor teams to be sent overseas,” according to the CIA, was “to liquidate top-level terrorist leaders. Non-terrorists also were reportedly candidates for assassination,” the CIA reported in May 1977, and “some leaders of Amnesty Internation[al] were mentioned as targets.”

The secret CIA report is included among more than 500 pages of documents on repression during the military dictatorship in Argentina declassified today by the Obama administration as part of a commitment made by the president last March when he visited Buenos Aires on the 40th anniversary of the military coup. “I believe we have a responsibility to confront the past with honesty and transparency,”

Obama stated then.

The CIA’s sources inside Condor reported that “a training course was held in Buenos Aires for the team heading overseas,” and that “Condor leaders were considering the dispatch of a team to London—disguised as businessmen—to monitor ‘suspicious’ activities in Europe.” According to the CIA, “Another proposal under study included the collection of material on the membership, location, and political activities of human rights groups in order to identify and expose their socialist and Marxist connections. Similar data reportedly are to be collected on church and third-world groups.”

In another TOP SECRET/EXDIS/CODEWORD Condor document declassified today, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research reported that “six Southern Cone nations" which were “participants in a counterterrorist network codenamed ‘Condor’” have agreed “to undertake the liquidation of Latin American” targets “living in France.”

The documents are part of a second tranche of intelligenceand presidential records posted today on the website of the Department of National Intelligence. The administration posted an initial set of documents on Argentina, drawn from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, on August 8, 2016. As more records are processed for declassification, several more releases are planned for 2017, after Obama leaves office.

“With the release of this revealing documentation, President Obama has advanced the cause of human rights in Argentina and elsewhere,” said Carlos Osorio, who directs the Southern Cone documentation project at the National Security Archive and has actively supported the Administration’s special declassification project. “This gesture of declassification diplomacy,” Osorio noted, “will be part of the legacy of Obama’s presidency.

Among the documents that the National Security Archive identified as newsworthy was a NSC summary of the torture of Alfredo Bravo the president of Argentina’s Permanent Assembly for Human Rights.

The report was sent in August 1978 to President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, by his top aide for Latin America, Robert Pastor, who detailed the atrocities the military had committed against Bravo. Pastor reported that Bravo had been “subjected to a bucket treatment where his feet were held in a bucket of ice water until thoroughly chilled and then shoved into a bucket of boiling water.” Bravo had also been subjected to electrical shocks and “subjected to ‘the submarine’—repeatedly being held under water until almost drowned.”

In a handwritten note in the margin of the document Brzezinski wrote: “a compelling, powerful report.

For further information, contact: Carlos Osorio: cosorio@gwu.edu

The National Security Archive plans to post additional documents from the new release on Argentina on its website:

National Security Archive

Read Unredacted, the Archive blog

THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals

Has History been Altered?

Thucydides, the Ancient Greek Propagandist told as much. See what others had to say....

The Myth of Scientific Infallibility

Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, puts it like this:

"The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness."

"To understand the potential costs of failing to engage at the level of method, consider theInnocence Project’s recent investigation of 268 criminal trials in which evidence from hair analysis had been used to convict defendants. In 257 of those cases, the organization found forensic testimony by FBI scientists to be flawed — a conclusion the FBI does not dispute. What is more, each inaccurate analysis overstated the strength of hair evidence in favor of the prosecution. Thirty-two defendants in those cases were eventually sentenced to death, of whom fourteen have either died in prison or have been executed. This is an extreme example of how straightforwardly deferring to expert opinion — without considering how those opinions were arrived at — is not only an inadequate truth-seeking strategy, but a potentially harmful one."